Tag Archives: drought

Around The World, A Frantic Search For Water

California has entered its fourth  year of epic drought.   The vast number of people living in California are not immediately threatened–they actually don’t use all that much water–but California agriculture may be well down the road to all but disappearing (and that is a really big deal–California feeds the US).  California may also be entering […]

Wars and Rumors of Wars: Syria

Trying to dig into conflict in the Middle East (anywhere in the Middle East) is like peeling an endless onion – it is just layer after painful layer of a history of intrigue and treachery and international interventions and hatred, all of which is directly influencing current events.  A succession of American presidents have tried […]

Water Wars – in the US and the Middle East

I highly recommend that you read the two main articles cited in this post.  Both regard water, conflict, and societal impact on a potentially broad scale, and both come at it from very different but complimentary perspectives. The first of the articles is from the New York Times and details some of the impacts currently […]

Tipping Point for Global Food Supply?

Regular readers will know that I bang on quite a bit about food supply and food prices, and for good reason:  Increases in food prices rapidly bring down weak societies, which leads in turn to war (or internal conflicts), sickness, forced migration, etc.  Global food prices are our best single indicator of the relative peace, […]

Increasingly Frequent Disasters and the Fulfillment of Prophecy

Take a good, careful look at the chart below.  The chart, courtesy of Emdat (www.emdat.be/natural-disasters-trends) reflects the number of reported disasters from the period of 1900 to 2010.  Unfortunately, Emdat does not yet have the data up for 2011, a year full of very expensive disasters, so we have to work with what we’ve got. […]